The new company is sparked by Choi’s 2013 MAD talk about hunger, as well as Patterson’s Tenderloin work with Larkin Street via his Cooking Project, which we’ve written about before. Though the (non-profit) Cooking Project will continue in tandem with (for-profit) Loco’l, Patterson believes that kids need to eat good food before wanting to cook it.

How and why Daniel Patterson and Roy Choi are starting a new fast food chain, Loco'l

Chef Daniel Patterson, center, teaches Armand Seversson, left, and Ralph Willis, right, how to chop an onion during a Cooking Project class in San Francisco on June 17, 2013. Photo: The Chronicle/Ian C. Bates

“The way this came out of the Cooking Project is the very immediate and visceral experience of working with the kids and seeing how they interacted with foods that they never experienced,” says Patterson. “How can we reach the most people possible? The fact is we reached over 400 (kids) the last year. That’s great but it’s not going to create societal change. The question is how to do make a bigger impact?”

“What does every kid eat? Fast food.”

There will be “smashes” — burger-like patties (pictured above) engineered with 30 percent grain/tofu and 70 beef, and a 24-hour fermented soft bun from Tartine’s Chad Robertson. Prices will be comparable to McDonald’s: $2 to $6.

They still need to find spaces, but the first two — the Tenderloin and Los Angeles — are expected in the first half of 2015. Once they find investors, the first round of growth is slated for California, with the rest of the country (hopefully) to follow.

“The mistake that a lot of people make that want to create change is they try to jump too far,” he says. “The way I like to think about it is a staircase. You can’t step from the ground to the fifth stair in one stride. The first thing we want is to go from sh***y, industrial, badly raised, chemically raised food to delicious whole food. Let us make that jump first, and then we can go further. One step at a time.”